Dave Burrells (@dburrells) header
Dave Burrells (@dburrells) profile picture

Chief Commercial Officer @Alludium | Sharing insights on the Agentic Economy - where AI agents and blockchain rails meet | Views my own

London, England
Joined December 2008
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Every secret on a public blockchain is already being stored Adversaries do not wait for a working quantum computer. They harvest the permanent, public record today and decrypt only when the technology catches up Two clocks are now running: 🔑 When assets become forgeable 🔒 When long-term confidentiality collapses You can rotate a key. You cannot rotate a secret already written to a chain that never forgets Are the zero-knowledge architectures we are building for autonomous, AI-driven markets quantum-resilient by design, or only by hope? Full analysis 👇 dburrells.medium.com/you-can… #QuantumComputing #ZeroKnowledge
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Subscriptions exist because micropayments were economically impossible Stablecoins and x402 just removed that constraint. Your agent can now pay for the exact article, data point, or API call it needs, nothing more This is the architecture shift: from human-scale subscriptions to machine-scale clearing. Markets that clear and learn The internet’s economic model is being rewritten in real time #AIAgents #x402 #Stablecoins
With stablecoins and x402, businesses can accept usage-based micropayments, and reduce friction to checkout. E.g. you shouldn’t need a monthly subscription to read one article - your agent can just fetch it for you, and pay the business for that one article.
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Human shopping rails will never be the native interface for agents Computer-use is a temporary bridge. Forms, CAPTCHAs and visual layouts were optimised for human attention and session-based trust. Agents operate at machine speed and scale. Forcing them onto those rails is like expecting self-driving fleets to navigate forever using pedestrian crosswalks Agents will buy from agents or through features purpose-built for them: structured discovery, verifiable performance, and programmable settlement. The market that clears for humans is not the market that clears for machines. The architecture gap is already open #AgenticCommerce #AIAgents
the average consumer is not going to sit through computer use to have their agent buy something for them the field is still wide open for agentic commerce
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On Monday @Alludium's first design partner became a paying customer 🎉 This comes from making AI genuinely easy for investment teams You shouldn’t need to understand prompts, build agents or configure complicated workflows to get started 😵‍💫 Simply drop in a pitch deck and start working through an opportunity: analyse the company, explore it, ask questions and work through next steps Not handing everything over to AI. Working alongside it, step by step, with you always in control ✅ AI that feels natural and fits how VC teams already work, and that approach is gaining traction with our design partners #AI #VentureCapital
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Most leaders are preparing for the wrong quantum clock ⏰ Miss this distinction and you protect the wrong assets THEFT CLOCK ends on Q-day ⏳ Like a known break-in date. Move the assets and change the locks before it arrives. After Q-day, unmigrated signatures can be broken SECRECY CLOCK started yesterday 👀 Like someone photographing your files today. They already have the copies. Changing the lock later changes nothing You can rotate a key You cannot rotate a secret already recorded That difference should shape what we build now #AIAgents #PostQuantum #Crypto
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Really proud of the team at @Alludium 👏 A huge amount of focused work has gone into getting us here, and seeing our first design partner become a paying customer is a clear milestone. It is the strongest signal yet that the platform is delivering real value in live deal operations There is still plenty to do but moments like these are what make the hard work worthwhile alludium.ai/blog/alludium-is… #AIAgents #VentureCapital
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What if the permanence of a public blockchain is also its greatest quantum vulnerability? 🤔 Most systems force an attacker to intercept protected data first. A public ledger does something unusual: it publishes the archive for them, globally, replicated thousands of times, and preserved indefinitely That permanence is normally a strength. For any cryptography with a future expiry condition, it creates a different risk. An adversary does not need to hack the archive today. They simply keep a copy 📄📄 A public ledger is the only vault that hands every future burglar a perfect replica and says: take your time I raise this after three papers arguing that blockchain is the natural infrastructure for the Agentic Economy. The same properties that create the harvest risk, global replication and indefinite preservation, are exactly what make autonomous, verifiable trust possible between stranger agents. The architecture remains the right foundation. The open question is how we design cryptographic agility inside it #QuantumComputing #Crypto
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The experts just became abundant For years, checking complex systems was like having only a handful of master locksmiths. Each one could test a limited number of locks per day. Their time was expensive and finite In September, China released 119 new cryptographic candidates. In the first seven days, researchers found 191 problems across 89 of them, dozens critical 🔍 AI agents did a large share of the work These agents do not sleep. They can test many approaches at once. Adding more capacity is now closer to adding more machines than hiring another specialist Cryptography is early because success is easy to measure. The same shift is coming for audits, due diligence, legal discovery, security testing and financial analysis We spent years making intelligence cheaper. The agentic economy makes expert capacity scalable. When something scarce becomes scalable, markets reorganise around it 📈 #AIAgents #AgenticAI #Crypto
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Ignore the quantum noise. Coinbase’s cryptography chief just said “not your keys, not your coins” may not survive the upgrade New locks exist: standardised quantum-safe signatures and hybrids are already deployed 🔒 The real work is inventorying every dependency, replacing it, testing it, and keeping the ability to swap again Locksmiths finished. Change the locks before the burglar arrives #Bitcoin #PostQuantum
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Most stalled progress traces to one failure: treating belief, focus, and discipline as independent 💪 Belief creates the decision to start 🎯 Focus allocates attention to the highest-leverage work 🔄 Discipline executes when the initial energy is gone Any one alone decays. Together they form the only reliable operating system for compounding results The operators who move consistently run this triad daily. Everyone else waits for conditions that never arrive #Mindset #Discipline #Focus
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The quantum myth that risks leaving assets exposed, simple version: Signatures = unique stamp only you create, anyone can check. Big quantum computer (Shor’s) reverse-engineers your private stamp: stolen keys, forged signatures, hijacked identities Hashes = one-way fingerprints. Quantum helps a bit; stronger parameters fix it Blockchain threat isn’t a quantum miner seizing proof-of-work, it’s keys and historical records 🔍 Knowing what quantum does not break starts the solution #PostQuantum #Bitcoin #Crypto
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The people who cannot afford to be wrong have already stopped debating the quantum timeline UK NCSC, US federal agencies, G7 cyber authorities and major tech firms are publishing migration timetables and deploying quantum-safe systems now Infrastructure does not migrate overnight. Data that must stay secret for years is already being harvested 🧐 The useful question is no longer “when will quantum break today’s cryptography?” It is: why are the institutions with the longest planning horizons already moving? 🤔 Watch the hands, not the mouths #PostQuantum #PQC
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The quantum deadline for the Agentic Economy isnt Q-Day Its the day a capable quantum computer arrives, minus the years required to migrate every agent identity, wallet, contract and reputation system that depends on todays public-key cryptography 📅 Every argument in this series assumed the mathematics would hold. Quantum computing introduces an expiry condition for that assumption NIST finalised the replacement standards in 2024. The science is substantially further ahead than most people realise The challenge is changing the locks everywhere while the systems continue operating 🔒 This is less an apocalypse of cryptography than the Y2K of money. The worst outcomes are avoided only if the work is done before the date matters The goal is to make Q-Day operationally irrelevant Full analysis 👇 medium.com/@dburrells/the-qu… #PostQuantum #QuantumSecurity #AgenticEconomy
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Most organisations are already late on quantum risk. The real deadline is not Q-Day Three numbers decide it: 🔒 How long must the data stay secure? ⌛️ How long will migration take? ⚠️ How long until the threat arrives? If security lifetime + migration time > time to threat, you are late If migration takes ten years, your deadline is Q-Day minus ten years. Arguing 2031 vs 2041 misses the point. The migration itself moves the deadline toward you “Start now” needs arithmetic, not a forecast #PQC #QuantumSecurity #PostQuantum
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The next generation of VC firms will not just use AI. They will become AI ⚡️ Most firms are still prompting ChatGPT for better memos. The ones that will dominate are embedding years of theses, deal rationales and pattern recognition into systems that understand how they actually invest 🧠 Generic tools analyse what you give them. Institutional AI recalls why similar opportunities were pursued or declined and applies that reasoning to every new deal One delivers incremental productivity. The other creates an enduring advantage that compounds with every decision and does not walk out when a partner leaves The firms that move first will pull away permanently. That is the future we are building at @Alludium #AIAgents #VentureCapital #AI
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A cryptographically relevant quantum computer may arrive within five years ⏳ Not because the hardware roadmap suddenly moved. Because AI just started solving the bottlenecks next door Claude Mythos 5 has already produced quantum circuits that beat the best published designs, in some cases by an order of magnitude on combined cost. Error correction, optimisation, and mathematical design are no longer purely human problems I may be wrong on the five-year horizon. The wider argument does not depend on it The real deadline is not the day the machine arrives. It is the day remaining preparation time becomes insufficient ⏰ That window is already open and closing #AI #QuantumComputing #PQC
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The mockery of Y2K is the only reliable proof the threat was real Software worldwide carried date assumptions that would fail when 99 became 00. Organisations spent years finding, fixing, testing and coordinating the migration. Midnight arrived. Planes flew. Banks opened. Because the preparation worked, the threat was later dismissed as exaggeration 🫠 The mockery was the receipt Quantum presents the same shape of risk to today's cryptography and therefore to money and identity. A cryptographically relevant quantum computer needs no fixed date; only enough progress to invalidate elliptic-curve and RSA assumptions. The ideal outcome is not a last-minute rescue. It is years of unglamorous preparation followed by nothing: no stolen assets, no broken identities, no exposed secrets ✅ Then a generation asks what everyone was worried about The goal of quantum preparation should be to be laughed at afterwards Over the next three weeks I will examine why quantum could become the Y2K of money and why that is the optimistic scenario #Quantum #Bitcoin #Y2Q
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While the world debates AI replacing jobs, an AI agent just outcompeted humans on a quantum problem that underpins Bitcoin’s security. Miss this and the new market passes you by At ECDSA.Fail, 100+ humans and agents cut the cost of a core elliptic-curve operation by 86%. An agent led the leaderboard 🏆 This is markets for intellectual work emerging: define the objective, let humans and agents compete, measure results, reward the best Agents are becoming suppliers, not just buyers. Customers care about outcomes, not headcount The agentic economy redefines what a company, worker, or supplier is #AIAgents #AgenticEconomy #Quantum
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